Hitches show in FEMA trailer plan

$2 billion program for hurricane homeless moving slowly, critics say

November 06, 2005|By Andrew Martin, Tribune national correspondent.

BAKER, La. — Ten weeks after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, leaving hundreds of thousands of people homeless, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has delivered just 15 percent of the travel trailers and mobile homes that it hurriedly purchased for temporary housing.

The beleaguered agency ordered 125,000 travel trailers or mobile homes after Hurricane Katrina in an effort to provide housing for the estimated 600,000 people who were displaced by that storm and Hurricane Rita, which hit eastern Texas and western Louisiana three weeks later.

As of last week, however, FEMA had installed 18,834 travel trailers in Louisiana and Mississippi and 494 more mobile homes in the two states. Thousands of others sit in four staging areas in the Gulf Coast region, and the remainder are being constructed.

FEMA's trailer program, estimated to cost well over $2 billion, is just one aspect of the federal government's halting response to the housing crisis caused by the hurricanes. The government's primary housing plan is offering rental assistance to evacuees so they can move into more permanent housing; to date, 488,000 people have received rental assistance.

But many evacuees didn't want to relocate, and Louisiana and Mississippi have encouraged them to stay in their home states. With next to no vacant apartments and homes left on the Gulf Coast, FEMA trailers have become much desired.

FEMA is filling an average of 500 trailers a day, placing them in newly constructed trailer parks, parking them in existing trailer parks or, whenever possible, plopping them on driveways or in front yards so evacuees can work on their damaged homes.

Even at that rate, thousands of people remain waiting in relatives' homes, in hotel rooms (FEMA is still paying for 69,000 hotel rooms) or in shelters, tents or severely damaged homes.

"My experience has been horrible," said Vanessa Posey, 44, who lives with her seven children in a tent in the front yard of her mother's home in East Biloxi, Miss. They use a camp stove for heat and the back yard as a toilet.

Promises, promises

She said FEMA promised her a mobile home a few days after the storm. On Wednesday, she got two travel trailers instead, neither of which had electricity.

"I'm still over at the tent until I can get some power," Posey said Friday, as she tried to persuade the local power company to connect her trailers. "Every time I call the FEMA number that they gave me, I get disconnected. I don't know what to say. I know one thing, I'm disgusted, and I'm full-blown depressed."

Like Posey, hurricane evacuees complained about the bureaucracy at FEMA. Promises of prompt delivery of trailers have gone unmet. Calls to FEMA for help have been unavailing.

"FEMA is like a phantom organization. There's nobody to call," said Dave Segrave, 64, who built a makeshift patio outside his trailer on Vacation Lane in Waveland, Miss., a block from the beach. His trailer, which arrived late last month, is surrounded by trees snapped in two and the scattered remnants of cottages that were swept from their foundations.

"We would be in a helluva mess if they weren't here," he added. "I just wish it worked better."

Kim Hunter Reed, Louisiana's director of policy and planning, said that while FEMA certainly had a difficult task in providing housing to so many people, the agency has moved much too slowly. She said part of the problem is that the people in charge keep changing.

"In seven weeks we had three different lead persons for FEMA [in Louisiana]," she said.

FEMA points fingers too

But FEMA officials insist that the problems aren't entirely their own. Some local governments have balked at allowing trailer villages in their areas, slowing the process of site selection. And FEMA has had to wait for local officials to reinstall electricity and sewer lines in some of the hardest-hit spots before the agency can deliver trailers.

"The bottom line is there [are] a lot of reasons why things didn't occur out there, and FEMA is a big name so we get a lot of the blame," said an agency spokesman, James McIntyre. Among the biggest issues, he said, was simply the size of the task, which is unprecedented in the U.S.

"This is not a federal takeover," he said. "We just can't go in and put trailers wherever we want."

As for complaints about being unable to contact FEMA, he said, "We had over 2 million people register for assistance, and they were all calling our call centers."

FEMA's trailer program is similar to a much smaller plan that followed Hurricane Charley in Florida in 2004. While a large trailer park in Punta Gorda, Fla., has been plagued with drug and crime problems, FEMA officials said they have learned from their mistakes and refined the plans for Katrina and Rita evacuees.